The Future of Just War New Critical Essays [Hardcover]

Caron E. Gentry (Editor)
CARON E. GENTRY is a lecturer at the School of International Relations, University of St. Andrews. She is the author of Offering Hospitality: Questioning Christian Approaches to War and, with Laura Sjoberg, coauthor of Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics, and coeditor of Women, Gender, and Terrorism (Georgia).

Amy E. Eckert (Editor)
AMY E. ECKERT is an associate professor of political science at the Metropolitan State University of Denver. She is coeditor of the essay collection Rethinking the 21st Century: New Problems, Old Solutions.

Just War scholarship has adapted to contemporary crises and situations. But its adaptation has spurned debate and conversation—a method and means of pushing its thinking forward. Now the Just War tradition risks becoming marginalized. This concern may seem out of place as Just War literature is proliferating, yet this literature remains welded to traditional conceptualizations of Just War. Caron E. Gentry and Amy E. Eckert argue that the tradition needs to be updated to deal with substate actors within the realm of legitimate authority, private military companies, and the questionable moral difference between the use of conventional and nuclear weapons. Additionally, as recent policy makers and scholars have tried to make the Just War criteria legalistic, they have weakened the tradition’s ability to draw from and adjust to its contemporaneous setting.

The essays in The Future of Just War seek to reorient the tradition around its core concerns of preventing the unjust use of force by states and limiting the harm inflicted on vulnerable populations such as civilian noncombatants. The pursuit of these challenges involves both a reclaiming of traditlãf